He was, as Pope says, 'fed with dedications'; for Tickell 12 affirms that no dedicator was unrewarded 2. To charge all unmerited praise with the guilt of flattery, and to suppose that the encomiast always knows and feels the falsehood of his assertions, is surely to discover great ignorance of human nature and human life. In determinations depending not on rules, but on experience and comparison, judgement is always in some degree subject to affection. Very near to admiration is the wish to admire 3.

Every man willingly gives value to the praise which he receives, 13 and considers the sentence passed in his favour as the sentence of discernment. We admire in a friend that understanding that selected us for confidence; we admire more in a patron that judgement which, instead of scattering bounty indiscriminately, directed it to us; and, if the patron be an author, those performances which gratitude forbids us to blame, affection will easily dispose us to exalt.

To these prejudices, hardly culpable, interest adds a power 14 always operating, though not always, because not willingly, perceived. The modesty of praise wears gradually away; and perhaps the pride of patronage may be in time so increased that modest praise will no longer please.

Many a blandishment was practised upon Halifax which he 15 would never have known, had he had no other attractions than those of his poetry, of which a short time has withered the beauties. It would now be esteemed no honour, by a contributor to the monthly bundles of verses, to be told that, in strains either familiar or solemn, he sings like Montague*.

* 'Fed with soft dedication.' Ante, p. 46, n. 4.

2 Eng. Poets, xxxix. 219. In another passage Tickell, addressing Halifax, says that succeeding time 'Shall envy less thy garter than thy bays.' Ib. p. 181.

3 Post, GRANVILLE, 24.

'The learned often bewail the loss of ancient writers whose characters have survived their works; but perhaps if we could now retrieve them, we should find them only the Granvilles, Montagues, Stepneys, and Sheffields of their time, and wonder

by what infatuation or caprice they could be raised to notice.' The Rambler, No. 106.

Horace Walpole, having misquoted a line in Halifax, excused himself as 'happily not being very accurately read in so indifferent an author.' Anec. of Painting, iii. 194.

It is a remarkable proof of Halifax's self-knowledge that, from the moment at which he began to distinguish himself in public life, he ceased to be a versifier.' MACAULAY, History, vii. 79.

APPENDIX D (PAGE 45)

By the Test Act passed in 1673 and not repealed till 1828, all officeholders had to publicly receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. Many Nonconformists complied once, and never went to church again. By the bill of 1702 against Occasional Conformity all such persons were to be disabled from holding their employments,' and were exposed to ruinous fines. It was rejected by the Lords, but was renewed in 1703 and 1704. It was carried in 1711, with the omission of the fines. Macaulay's Hist. i. 231; Burnet's Hist. iii. 371, iv. 25, 71, 281; Parl. Hist. vi. 59, 154, 359, 1045. Mere nonconformity was by law a crime. Blackstone's Com. iv. 50, 54.

In The Spectator for Jan. 8, 1711-12, No. 269, Addison tells how Sir Roger believed the late Act already began to take effect; for that a rigid dissenter, who chanced to dine at his house on Christmas Day, had been observed to eat very plentifully of his plum-porridge.'

William Bromley, on Nov. 28, 1704, spoke in favour of tacking the bill on to the Land Tax Bill. Parl. Hist. vi. 359. Parliament was dissolved on April 5, 1705. b. p. 439. 'The Church in danger' was the Tory cry during the elections. Burnet's Hist. iv. 99. 'A pamphlet, said to be Mr. Bromley's speech, soon saw the light.' Halifax replied to it in An Answer to Mr. B's Speech, in a Letter to a Friend, 'which had such an influence on the elections that the major part of them were in favour of the Low Church Men.' Life of Halifax, pp. 113, 130. See post, GRANVILLE, 18.

THE

PARNELL

HE Life of Dr. Parnell is a task which I should very 1 willingly decline, since it has been lately written by Goldsmith', a man of such variety of powers and such felicity of performance that he always seemed to do best that which he was doing2; a man who had the art of being minute without tediousness, and general without confusion; whose language was copious without exuberance, exact without constraint, and easy without weakness.

What such an author has told, who would tell again? I have 2 made an abstract from his larger narrative; and have this gratification from my attempt that it gives me an opportunity of paying due tribute to the memory of Goldsmith.

Τὸ γὰρ γέρας ἐστὶ θανόντων 3.

THOMAS PARNELL was the son of a commonwealthsman of 3 the same name, who at the Restoration left Congleton in Cheshire, where the family had been established for several centuries, and, settling in Ireland, purchased an estate, which, with his lands in Cheshire, descended to the poet, who was born at Dublin in 1679; and, after the usual education at a grammar school, was at the age of thirteen admitted into the College 3, where in 1700

' In 1770. Forster's Goldsmith, 1871, ii. 223; Goldsmith's Works, iv. 129.

'Goldsmith's Life of Parnell is poor; not that it is poorly written, but that he had poor materials.' JOHNSON, Boswell's Johnson, ii. 166. Goldsmith's father and uncle had known Parnell. In apologizing for the absence of facts in the narrative of his youth he writes:-' A poet, while living, is seldom an object sufficiently great to attract much attention. ... When his fame is increased by time it is then too late to investigate the peculiarities of his disposition; the dews of the morning are past, and we vainly try to continue the chase by the meridian splendour.' Gold

smith's Works, iv. 130.

2

" Johnson said of Goldsmith:'Whether we take him as a poet, as a comic writer, or as an historian, he stands in the first class.' Boswell's Johnson, ii. 236. In his epitaph he describes him as one 'qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.' Íb. iii. 82.

Mr. G. A. Aitken, in the Preface to Parnell's Poems, 1894, has brought together the facts known about the poet. Odyssey, xxiv. 190.

3

4 Charles Stewart Parnell was descended from the poet's younger brother. Post, SWIFT, 77 n.

5 He was admitted much sooner than usual, as they are a great deal stricter in their examination for

4

5

he became master of arts; and was the same year ordained a deacon, though under the canonical age, by a dispensation from the Bishop of Derry'.

About three years afterwards he was made a priest; and in 1705 Dr. Ashe, the bishop of Clogher, conferred upon him the archdeaconry of Clogher 2. About the same time he married Mrs. Anne Minchin 3, an amiable lady, by whom he had two sons who died young, and a daughter who long survived him.

At the ejection of the Whigs, in the end of queen Anne's reign*, Parnell was persuaded to change his party, not without much censure from those whom he forsook, and was received by the new ministry as a valuable reinforcement. When the earl of Oxford was told that Dr. Parnell waited among the crowd in the outer room, he went, by the persuasion of Swift, with his treasurer's staff in his hand, to enquire for him, and to bid him welcome"; and, as may be inferred from Pope's dedication, admitted him as a favourite companion to his convivial hours', but, as it seems often to have happened

entrance than either at Oxford or Cambridge.' GOLDSMITH, Works, iv. 129.

The canonical age is twentythree. He was twenty-one. He was ordained by the Bishop [King, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin], but the dispensation was from the Primate. Ib. p. 130.

On Feb. 9, 1705-6. Aitken's Parnell, Preface, p. 1o. For Ashe see post, SWIFT, 70.

3 Johnson uses' Mrs.' according to its earlier usage. Goldsmith calls her 'Miss.'

...

4 Swift wrote on Sept. 9, 1710:'The Whigs were ravished to see me, and would lay hold on me as a_twig while they are drowning.. Every Whig in great office will, to a man, be infallibly put out.' Works, ii. 9. See post, GARTH, 12; SHEFFIELD, 19; PRIOR, 21; CONGREVE, 28; GRANVILLE, 16.

5 Having been the son of a Commonwealth's man, his Tory connections on this side of the water gave his friends in Ireland great offence.' GOLDSMITH, Works, iv. 131.

6 'Jan. 31, 1712-13. I contrived it so that Lord Treasurer came to me,

and asked (I had Parnell by me) whether that was Dr. Parnell, and came up and spoke to him with great kindness, and invited him to his house. Í value myself upon making the ministry desire to be acquainted with Parnell, and not Parnell with the ministry.' SWIFT, Works, iii. 102. See also ib. p. 81.

Johnson follows Delany, who, in his Observations, &c., p. 28, heightens the story: 'Swift made Lord Oxford, in the height of his glory, walk with his treasurer's staff from room to room through his own levy, inquiring which was Dr. Parnell.' See also post, SWIFT, 134 n.

7 For him thou oft hast bid the world attend,

Fond to forget the statesman in the friend;

For Swift and him despised the farce of state,

The sober follies of the wise and great;

Dexterous the craving, fawning

crowd to quit,

And pleased to 'scape from flattery
to wit.'

POPE, Epistle to Robert, Earl of
Oxford, L. 6.

in those times to the favourites of the great, without attention to his fortune', which however was in no great need of improvement 2.

Parnell, who did not want ambition or vanity, was desirous to 6 make himself conspicuous, and to shew how worthy he was of high preferment. As he thought himself qualified to become a popular preacher he displayed his elocution with great success in the pulpits of London; but the queen's death putting an end to his expectations abated his diligence: and Pope represents him as falling from that time into intemperance of wine 3. That in his latter life he was too much a lover of the bottle is not denied; but I have heard it imputed to a cause more likely to obtain forgiveness from mankind, the untimely death of a darling son; or, as others tell, the loss of his wife, who died (1712) in the midst of his expectations 5.

He was now to derive every future addition to his preferments 7 from his personal interest with his private friends, and he was not long unregarded. He was warmly recommended by Swift to archbishop King, who gave him a prebend in 17136, and in May 1716 presented him to the vicarage of Finglas in the diocese of Dublin, worth four hundred pounds a year?. Such notice from such a man 8 inclines me to believe that the vice of which he has been accused was not gross, or not notorious.

But his prosperity did not last long. His end, whatever was 8 its cause, was now approaching. He enjoyed his preferment little more than a year; for in July 1717, in his thirty-eighth year, he died at Chester, on his way to Ireland.

Post, POPE, 75, 91.

2 His fortune (fora poet) was very considerable, and it may easily be supposed he lived to the very extent of it.' GOLDSMITH, Works, iv. 136. 3 See Appendix E.

• He had two sons who died young, and one daughter who long survived him. Ib. p. 130.

5 'Those helps that sorrow first called for assistance habit soon rendered necessary, and he died before his fortieth year, in some measure a martyr to conjugal fidelity.' Ib. p. 140.

His wife died in 1711. Swift wrote on Aug. 24, 1711:-'I am heartily sorry for poor Mrs. Parnell's

death; she seemed to be an excellent good-natured young woman, and I believe the poor lad is much afflicted; they appeared to live perfectly well together.' Works, ii. 327. July 1, 1712. It seems he has been ill for grief of his wife's death.' Ib. iii. 35. 6 lb. xvi. 36.

7 Swift, in 1730, said it was 'worth about £100 a year.' Ib. vii. 293.

8 Post, SWIFT, 64. The Duke of Grafton, the Lord-Lieutenant, described him as 'charitable, hospitable, a despiser of riches, and an excellent bishop.' Coxe's Walpole, 1798, ii. 357.

In the register of Trinity Church, Chester, is the following entry: